ResLife Did Sophomores Dirty

For the second year in a row, and despite increased sophomore housing options, rising juniors have had severe difficulty acquiring rooming for the 2018-19 school year. On Wednesday, March 21, numerous sophomores looking for junior year housing received emails stating that they were not allowed to select housing on the day of the lottery as more juniors had selected the four-person suite option than there were four-person suites available. This notice came less than 48 hours before the housing lottery opened, yet these students did not receive the option to form new groups before the lottery and enter normally. Instead, they were required to go to the Office of Residential Life and sign up for housing on forms.This situation only worsens when the issue takes into account that some of these students will be forced to live in – previously sophomore Residential College – Faber Hall, taking the junior/senior privilege of having a living room and kitchen away from the class of 2020. At least if students intending to have full meal plans next year, regardless of residence, had this privilege revoked or this occurred based off of write ups or failing academics, this decision might be considered fair. Instead, this was based entirely off of a group lottery number, which averaged together each group member’s lottery number and did not take into account academics or standing with the University.For the second year in a row, sophomores are outraged.There are several things that ResLife can do to improve this situation in the future, some of which are suggestions that class of 2019 students proposed to ResLife when this occurred last year. The first is to separate the housing lottery over the course of two days. This would allow the primarily senior-member groups to pick housing first, then release what options are left so juniors can form housing groups based off of those numbers. That way students find out where they will be housing before, as occurred with the 2019 class, August. Another proposal is for ResLife to create a housing lottery based off of merit and standing with the University so that hard working students do not end up in environments where their academics are affected, or housing situations that go against their life styles and force them to spend more money they may or may not be able to afford on meal plans they do not want – as will occur in regard to the Faber situation. Another proposal is to simply notify students of issues earlier and with enough time for them to be re-entered into the normal lottery process so they are not punished for an issue that they did not cause, nor should they suffer the consequences for.